Ever used a dodgy builder? Then thank your lucky stars you’re not a granny cyclone victim in Bangladesh, with people from the government arriving to help. The money to build her a new house is provided by a climate-adaptation fund, but all she gets is a roof and floor but no walls. The structure then begins collapsing within two months.
The Paris climate talks next month are partly about creating a $US100b-a-year climate fund to help the Third World adjust to hypothesized global warming. In a bit of political theatre (we taxpayers bought her tickets), Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop last December pledged $200m to this fund, rhapsodizing about “investment, infrastructure, energy, forestry and emissions reductions.” [i] The Climate Fund is now taking heat for corruption and non-transparency. Newsweek, although a fervently warmist journal, ran a piece to that effect a few days ago.
An inkling of how such money actually gets spent comes from our Bangladesh example. Transparency International Bangladesh audited a $A4.5m project financed by a climate-change trust fund administered by the Bangladeshi government. It also tried to audit a sister-fund provided by aid donors, but couldn’t find enough documentation to even start the audit! One of its trenchant recommendations was to “mete out exemplary punishments to corrupt individuals.”
